Chris Cuomo Vows CNN Will Help White House ‘Shame’ Congress Into Action On Education

JOHN NOLTE13 Jan 2015

CNN’s Chris Cuomo openly promised Tuesday that CNN will help the White House in a “shame campaign” to get Congress to act on education. During an interview with Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, Cuomo also promised to use the show he co-hosts, “New Day,” in this shaming campaign.

“Secretary, my only advice for you is that you should go on a shame campaign with congress to get them to act,” Cuomo said. “New Day will help. CNN will help.” (full transcript of the exchange below).

The exchange in question centered on the White House proposal to use the federal government to force taxpayers to pay for two years of “free” community college. It would be unfair, though, to assume that Cuomo’s pledge centered on Obama’s push for free community college. Cuomo appears to be referring in general to Congress acting on education. Cuomo frequently urges federal officials from both parties to get things done.

This widespread idea in the media that Congress and/or the federal government “acting” automatically equates a virtue is its own kind of bias. Gridlock can also be a virtue. At least when there’s gridlock, my freedoms are safe. The job of Congress is to serve the people, not “act.” And sometimes Congress serves us best by not acting.

The media always want the federal government to “act.” God help us all.

Sadly, there is recent precedent for CNN engaging in this kind of activism. In 2013, CNN openly put the full force of its network behind a failed attempt to use the federal government as a means to restrict the Second Amendment civil rights of all Americans. Hours of programming were openly devoted to pushing the Left’s anti-freedom agenda.

CNN was also vital and on the front lines of pushing the now-debunked hoaxes that claimed racism was behind the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. In the case of Michael Brown, CNN pushed the lie even after the lie was exposed as a lie.

Here’s the transcript, including Cuomo’s pledge to use his network and morning news show to aid the White House in a shaming campaign against Congress:

CHRIS CUOMO: Community college. The pushback on that issue is that, one, we don’t know that college is even the right way to get into the job force anymore, and if you make it too easy for people to get into college, you wind up getting the wrong people to go in who don’t want to work for it enough. if all these other kids are struggling and they don’t qualify, the wrong kids qualify. Those are the typical points of pushback. Your response.

SECRETARY OF EDUCATION ARNE DUNCAN: The days in which you could just graduate from high school and get a high wage job that you progress into the middle class — pretty hard to do that today.

To have young people have access to a community college whether they’re 28-year-olds, 38-year-olds, 50-year-olds coming back to retrain, retool — management jobs, high tech jobs, jobs that relate to the health care and advanced manufacturing — when I visit community colleges, and I’ve been to dozens around the country, those are some of the most inspiring visits I make. These are people across the spectrum coming back to school to gain the skills to enter the middle class. We need to support those efforts and support the partnerships between community colleges and local industry. Many community colleges today are becoming regional economic engines. They’re driving economic activity. Creating jobs in their communities. We have to support that. We want to keep great jobs in our communities and ultimately in our nation.

CUOMO: Secretary, my only advice for you is that you should go on a shame campaign with congress to get them to act. “New Day” will help. CNN will help. We wish you good luck, Secretary Duncan. You’re going to have a lot of challenges in front of you, but the biggest one is to get Washington to do anything.

DUNCAN: I’ll take you up on that thank you very much.

Though that might not have been his intent, Cuomo’s vow will still aid Democrats and the Obama White House in the creation of a false narrative that this new Congress — which is only a few days old — is a do-nothing Congress. This, despite the fact that on January 13 of an even-numbered year, that line of criticism is outright absurd.

This is a little off topic, but has anyone in the mainstream media ever questioned the premise of the federal government being involved in education in the first place? (And, yes, I’m well aware that No Child Left Behind is a Republican boondoggle.)

If I had a dollar for every time the media floated the idea of federalism, I’d be dead broke.